Overview of introductory resources in AI Governance
This post was created as part of the Supervised Program for Alignment Research, Spring 2024. This work would not have happened without the encouragement and accountability of my supervisor, Peter Gebauer.
The AI Governance ecosystem is large and difficult to apprehend. There are tons of content, relevant organizations, introductory resources, newsletters and more. As a newcomer to this field, I found it hard to navigate the ecosystem and find the information I needed. I discovered lots of resources purely by chance, months after they could have been useful for me.
What I felt was missing was introductory resources that would not only introduce the “type of work” that is AI Governance, but also direct me towards the resources I needed at different times.
Desiderata: The perfect entry point to the ecosystem would allow me, no matter my background and my intentions, to find the resources I need.
The technical alignment ecosystem on the other hand seems far more organized, in no small part thanks to the Alignment Ecosystem Development team, which created tons of introductory resources, indexes, and other variations on the theme “list of links to useful stuff”. Since I discovered AI alignment two years ago, the resources AED created have helped me navigate the ecosystem and find opportunities I would have missed. I expect similar resources to also be valuable for AI governance.
I decided to investigate thoroughly what were the various introductory resources to AI Governance. Maybe the resources actually existed, and I just did not know where to find them? I compiled my findings below, to help newcomers find those resources faster, and hopefully to motivate others to fill in the gaps where resources are lacking. Hopefully, someone will get motivated to build the ultimate entry point to AI Governance!
There are various kinds of resources which could be labeled as an “introduction to AI Governance”. My main criteria was whether a specific resource introduced an area of AI Governance, or allowed discovering more parts of the AI Governance ecosystem. I categorize below every resource I found, and give my recommendations for when to use each of those.
Disclaimer: I’m coming at AI Governance from a catastrophic risk perspective, so by AI Governance resources, I mean AI governance resources which could help someone like me who wants to reduce catastrophic risks due to AI.
The following resources give a general overview of what AI Governance is. As they all target different audiences, I indicated when to use each specific resource.
Those resources give a broad overview of the various research directions in AI governance.
AKA “big lists of links”. Those resources are lists of links to various kinds of other resources, serving mainly as indexes. As there is no canonical resource in this category, they all have significant overlap and differences.
Those resources are mostly linked to each other, so all of them seem like reasonable starting points to explore the breadth of resources in AI Governance.
AKA “lists of every X”. Those resources focus on listing all the instances of something related to AI governance, be it organizations, training programs, research directions and more. I expect that some of them are not sufficiently well known for the value they provide.
Some of those were initially focused on technical AI safety and expanded to AI governance. They sometimes necessitate some filtering to find those relevant to AI governance.
There are a myriad of newsletters relevant to AI Governance. Newsletters are probably the best aggregators of AI Governance content, but they’re not as searchable as living lists.
A brief note on the history of the project: Initially, the project’s goal was to make a list/map/visualization of what every person in AI Governance is working on. After discussing with different people working in AI policy, we concluded that creating such a public resource would potentially be negative. I’m not sure how positive it is to share existing ones, but included them for completeness.
The following resources are indexes of people who voluntarily added themselves. They can be filtered to find people linked to AI Governance.
Creating this post made me discover multiple resources which I could have used if I had known about them earlier. I expect that making it easier for the right person to find the right information at the right time could have a large impact and be tractable.
Desiderata: The perfect entry point to the ecosystem would allow me, no matter my background and my intentions, to find the resources I need.
This could either be a new resource or an extension of an existing one. I expect that improving an existing resource would be faster and require lower maintenance.
My suggestion would be to improve the AI Governance section of aisafety.info.
Pros:
Cons
I hope this list will help some of you find resources you did not know existed, and inspire someone to improve the status quo.
Feel free to suggest additional resources I might have missed!